“If there was, don’t you think I would have used it by now?” he retorted.
“Yeah, okay, good point.” I lifted my head, and of course one sheet wanted to stick to my face. I yanked it off, slamming it back down. I really hated lists.
The only saving grace was that I was now more or less conversational in the native language. I still ran into words and phrases that were new, and that would likely be the case for years yet, but I could read simple books now. So, lists like this didn’t challenge my intellectual knowledge. Just my sanity.
We’d commandeered a room in the Kingsmen Offices on the palace grounds and basically turned it into our investigative HQ. Gibson had found a chalkboard on wheels from somewhere and rolled it in here so we could write down any names we saw pop up more than once. I’d gotten into the habit of keeping a list of any surname I saw multiple times. That helped me more than anything. I wasn’t even trying to keep all this in my head.
The other men had come up with their own systems, which seemed to work for them. I honestly didn’t know the best approach to this. I could only hope that whatever our approach, we didn’t somehow bungle this and miss the people we needed to pinpoint. Whenever Henri got here, I hoped to have him do a magical search on the common names we had found, maybe speed this up a little.
It might have worked better if we’d been able to sit somewhere with a view. Or at least windows. But the only office space available was dead center in the building, enclosed on all sides. It really felt like I was being punished for some dreadful sin, locked in the room like this. I would have taken the lists outside to work instead, but we currently had a raging storm beating at the city. You could hear the rain pelting the roof in a loud tumult. I was stuck.
I really, really wanted a computer.
Our experiment the day before had taught us a great deal. Gerring had not been able to either create a key or create a mold from the lock. Granted, he’d only had four hours to work with, but it was a complete failure. Henri and I had taken a stab at it and hadn’t had much better luck. The locks were indeed designed to be formidable, as locks on a safe should. It meant we’d have to go hunting for locksmiths later and hopefully find whoever had made the keys. It was a good lead, assuming it panned out.
But before that—lists.
A quick series of steps carried toward the door, and I looked around, ears perking. I knew those footsteps. The indomitable Magical Examiner had arrived.
Henri stepped in with two gold chocolate boxes in his hands, a thermos in the crook of his elbow, and a crooked smile on his face. “I’m finally free to help. I’ve chocolates and sun tea to fortify us.”
“You’re my favorite,” I informed him, reaching for the chocolate with gimme gimme hands.
Laughing, he handed the top box promptly over. “Gibson said you needed stimulating. Do have some tea and chocolates. Well, catch me up to speed.”
I paused him, as I wanted to know if he was here for an hour or if I finally had my partner back. “The wards?”
“I am, hopefully, done with those. We’re still not sure how Eddy slipped through, but the best we can come up with is another level of security to thwart him.” He took a seat at the head of the table, looking over the stacks of lists with misgiving. He had only exchanged one problem for another, and his expression clearly stated he realized that. “We’ve re-structured the wards to accept our new development, and your suggestion of leather passes works admirably well. It’s been tested, approved, and now some poor team of magicians gets to produce all the passes. More luck to them. Unless something else goes wrong, I am free of that responsibility.”
Lifting my hands above my head, I clapped and cheered. “Alright! Then you get to join us.”
“At apparently the wrong time,” he drawled, still eyeing the lists. “I feel the sudden urge to go visit Colette.”
“I will have Clint catch a mouse and release it in your pantry if you even think of abandoning me here,” I threatened. I was mostly kidding. Mostly.
He blanched and glared at me. “Nothing I’d ever do to you deserves such a threat. And where is Clint, anyway?”
“You know he doesn’t move on rainy days like this. He’s snoozing away wrapped in a blanket, the fiend.” I was admittedly jealous of my cat just then. “We’re still waiting to see if your genius paid off or not. Train station’s going through the records to see if any Raskovnik was shipped in the ten days or so prior to the heist.”
“Ah. Then we’ll see.” He doffed hat and coat, settling in more comfortably, and reached for the nearest pile.
I popped a delicious morsel of cherry and chocolate into my mouth, drank a cup of the tea, and felt much better for it. Then again, the brain ran off of water and sugar, so that only made sense.
Henri dove in by looking at the names we’d already found and doing a search on the papers to see if the name appeared again anywhere else. When those pages separated themselves out, Gibson took over and started matching them up. Foster took it from there and wrote out the name and the times they were on the trains, whether working or passenger. It relieved me to have something to speed up the process, even if it was only by a little.
The room turned quiet again as we all focused on the paper in front of us. I normally liked a bit of noise when working—not anything obnoxious, but a steady background sound. Pure silence unsettled me. But today the heavens provided my white noise as the rain continued to pelt the roof in a steady thrum.
I made it most of the way through the passenger list for the evening train, marking a dozen or so possible names that looked familiar, when Foster asked uncertainly, “Should I mark it when the same employee rides the trains?”
That question brought all our heads up, although Gibson was the one to respond. “Yes, I think so. We’re still not sure whether or not the employees played any part in this. Why, do you see someone consistent?”
“Two people, sir. Train engineer and the guard.”
“Ah. Mark them. Just in case.”
Since Foster looked a bit confused, I elaborated for his benefit. “We’ve got mixed signals on this case. We’re almost a hundred percent sure an insider fed the thieves information. They knew too much. What we’re not sure is how active this person was in the theft. For instance, they had to use the Raskovnik in order to get through one of the locks, but they had keys for the rest. You see?”
Foster nodded immediately. “Yes, that is odd. Alright, I’ll mark employees as well.”
We returned to the lists.
Have you ever reached that point when you’re so focused on paying attention that you’re more focused on focusing than the actual thing you should be concentrating on? I found myself sliding into that zone when thankfully Henri broke the silence again.
“I’ve now seen Jodan Nichols twice. Anyone else?”
I had Nichols written down as a possibility and quickly reviewed the sheet I’d checked Nichols on. “Huh. Me too.”
Gibson lifted a hand. “Thirded. Foster, put that name on the board.”
Belatedly, I thought to ask, “Can everyone double check the engineer and guard’s name too? Guard for me was Cain Innis. Engineer Ezer Fagin.”
Henri shook his head. “Different engineer for me. But the guard’s the same.”
“Thirded on the guard as well. I do have the same engineer as Jamie,” Gibson threw in.
“I have a different engineer–Kuper Seabrook?” Foster looked about but didn’t see any nods. “No? Alright. But the guard’s the same. I have Cain Innis for both evening trains on the sixth and seventh.”
Dots started to connect in my head. “I have him for the ninth and tenth. Who’s got the eighth?”
“Me,” Henri volunteered. “Gibson, what days are you looking at?”
“Fourteenth and fifteenth. He’s guarding the train for both days.” Turning to me, Gibson inquired, “Didn’t Mrs. Watts say the guard shifts are normally seven days on, seven off?”
“Yeah, because they guar
d all day. That’s weird, right? It’ll make sense if he’s guarding the sixth through the thirteenth, that’s a full shift for him. But he shouldn’t be back to guarding by the fourteenth. Unless he was pulling extra shifts. Are they allowed to do that?”
“A good question for Mrs. Watts.” Gibson made a note. “Alright, keep going.”
Now that we were actually making some progress, I felt more energized. Having some payoff always soothes the brain.
I lost time while shuffling around lists and double-checking names. It could have been ten minutes or three hours before the door opened. Sherard swept inside with a disgruntled Clint held like a football in his arm. The feline perked up on seeing me and started squirming, silently demanding to be let down.
“Jamie, your creature just about caused cardiac arrest for every guard on duty,” Sherard informed me tartly, thrusting the purple furball at me. “He waltzed through the wards as if they didn’t even exist. He’s not supposed to be able to do that.”
Clint crawled into my lap and clung to me, giving me pitiful eyes that protested his innocence.
Henri made a squawking noise of protest. “Clint! How did you do that? Blast it, wait, I bet I know. Intent.”
“He didn’t have any intent except to find his person,” Sherard confirmed, still glaring at Clint. “I truly wish we could somehow alter the wards to close out that clause. It’s somehow circumventing the need for permission.”
“You can’t, not without turning the palace grounds into a prison and completely scrapping the wards we have now and rebuilding them from scratch,” Henri denied wearily.
I looked down at the pitiful cat huddling in my arms and wasn’t sure who to feel sorry for—the boys or the cat. “Sorry? Clint, I thought you were going to nap at home today. You told me you didn’t want to get out in the rain.”
“Lonely,” he said mournfully.
“You must have been, to brave getting wet all the way here.” I assumed Sherard had hit him with a drying spell since he wasn’t damp. “Sorry, Sherard. Did he completely overturn all your efforts?”
“No,” Sherard said on a long sigh. “I lied to them. I managed to convince everyone that because you’re in here, and you have right of passage, the wards recognized him as your familiar of sorts and granted him permission too. For all I know, that’s actually what happened.”
“That’s probably it,” Henri observed. “In fact, I’ll bet it is.”
Technically, he’s not my familiar…yeah, you know, I was going to let sleeping dogs lie on this one. “Okay. Want some chocolate?”
He nodded, snagged two pieces, then reconsidered and grabbed a third before whirling dramatically for the door once more. I assumed he was returning to work on the wards and getting the new protocols set up.
I looked down at the cat in my arms and asked, “Are you going to help or nap?”
With a yawn, he curled himself about and settled into my lap, chin on his splayed legs.
“Of course you are.” Shaking my head, I went back to the list. Or attempted to. Foster’s nose kept twitching as he stared over the table at the bundle of fur in my lap. I got this reaction a lot with Clint. Most people had never seen a feline before. “Foster, this is my Felix. Have you heard of those?”
“Heard of them. Never seen one before now. It’s interesting. To my nose, he’s alive, but not mammal, if that makes sense.”
“He’s a construct of magic,” Henri pointed out. “That makes perfect sense.”
Clint opened an eye, looked at Foster with vague interest, then closed it again. Apparently nap took priority just then.
We returned again to the task at hand. It was definitely going faster now that Henri had joined us. He was good at fine detail work like this, no doubt a skill he’d learned in his occupation. Or maybe it was his talent that made him good at his job. Either way, with his help, I had high hopes we’d actually be done weeding through this pile sometime before the end of the century.
“Okay, everyone, stop. It’s past quitting time. Mark where you are, and we’ll pick up tomorrow.” Gibson looked around at us. “I think we’ve made good progress. Foster, how many names do we have?”
“Thirty at this point, sir.” Foster had thankfully numbered the names to help us keep track. “Some of these are probably innocent, I’m sure. More than a few people commute into the city from Bristol for work.”
“They’d have to be rather affluent to be able to afford it,” Henri pointed out. “Bristol is quite expensive to live in. And the train fare isn’t expensive, but if a person rode it daily, the fees would quickly add up.”
“So they would,” Gibson agreed. “We’ll need to keep that in mind while pruning these names down. Either way, enough for today.”
I was good with that. I stretched my arms out above my head, working out the kink in my shoulders, then hefted a boneless cat up. Clint went with a purr, settling in against my chest. No intention of walking by himself, eh.
Henri walked out with me, and that was nice. I’d not been able to just walk with him for a while. He’d been busy rushing from place to place for the past month.
“Did Colette seem to enjoy Girls’ Night?”
“Are you kidding?” I paused so he could open the door and then paused again on the porch to dig out my umbrella. Clint was, of course, not helpful in this effort. “She had a blast. At one point, she had us all literally on the ground and rolling with laughter. I’ve told her it’s mandatory from now on she come over on Girls’ Night. She was happy to agree.”
“Good. I didn’t get to hear much—I passed out fairly quickly. But it seemed as if your evening was enjoyable.”
“That it was. Colette said all her paperwork is now done. She’s a legal eagle. How does it look like she’s doing from your end?”
“Splendidly. I’ve spot checked her work and found that she’s done it all according to procedure. But I knew that she’d be good at this. And truly, it’s come in handy to have a female Magical Examiner when it’s a case that requires discretion.”
“Ah. I didn’t think of that, but I bet it does.” Then again, Kingston very much held to Victorian standards. I was still rolling my eyes at some of it. “Well. Here’s hoping we’ve finally caught a break!”
He shot me a disgruntled look. “Please do not jinx us.”
“Nah, that’s not enough to jinx us. We’ll be fine.”
I’d barely attained my flat when there came a call from my telephone. With such suspiciously impeccable timing, I wasn’t enthused about answering it. In fact, I had severe misgivings as I picked up the receiver. “Hello?”
“Ah, good, I timed it right. Davenforth, this is Gibson. Is your pad working? I couldn’t reach you on it.”
I pulled it free and looked at it with a sigh. “Apologies, I didn’t hear it chime.”
“Quite alright. Snag Jamie and meet us at the train yard. There’s been another robbery. Different line, same procedure.”
I just knew I should have ignored the ringing phone. Although lamentably, people knew where I lived. “I’ll fetch her.”
“Good. I’ve called a taxi, it’ll pick you up at the door.”
“I appreciate it.” Although I had a feeling it was less about courtesy and more about efficiency. Hanging up, I did take a moment to change suits, as mine was rather done for after a full day of tromping about in the rain, along muddy streets, and the like. Cleaning spells can only do so much before it ruins the pressed lines. As it had finally stopped raining, I had hopes of being somewhat dry and presentable for the rest of the evening.
Feeling a little better with the new clothes, I went up a floor and knocked on Jamie’s door. She opened it immediately, Clint in the crook of her elbow, and greeted me with, “Gibs just messaged me. Said he called you, there’s been a robbery, he’s got a taxi waiting. You know more than that?”
“That is, in fact, the extent of my knowledge. Are you ready?”
“Yeah, it’s not like I got settled.” Looking d
own at her Felix, she inquired, “Stay or go?”
“Go,” Clint informed her seriously. He had what I thought of as his ‘working face’ on.
Since he’d found a vital clue the last time he came to the station with us, I wasn’t inclined to argue. “Then let’s go.”
We tromped down the stairs and out to the somewhat shaded front door. As we did so, Jamie stopped and rapped on Mrs. Hudson’s door. Our elderly landlady answered it, wrapped in a thick shawl. I didn’t think it that cold, but the rain had made the foyer damp and chilly.
“Sorry to trouble you,” Jamie said with a grimace. “We got called out on a case, but I just called in an order of groceries. Can you put them in my cold box for me?”
“Oh, bless you, dear, of course. But you’re going out again tonight?” Mrs. Hudson peered doubtfully through the front windows. “It still looks like rain.”
“No help for it,” I informed her with a long sigh. “It’s best if we see the scene fresh.”
“If we’re lucky, we’ll be back tonight.” Jamie shrugged, already resigned to the very real possibility that it would be morning before we came home again. “Thanks, Mrs. Hudson.”
“Good luck, dears,” she called to us as we left.
“I have a feeling we’ll need it,” Jamie grumbled. “Ah, there’s our taxi.”
Indeed, the driver had a very handsome set of matched bays that looked fresh from a stable. The day shift must have already ended. We climbed up into the carriage and Jamie knocked on the roof to get him going.
The taxi set off and I eyed my partner, judging her on many levels. Physically, Jamie’s stamina and strength put most humans to shame. Only the weres could keep up with her. And the elves, of course. Magically speaking, her core was a mess and likely always would be. Magicians such as myself could take one look at her and see it. I used that sight now to gauge how she fared. Despite the insanity of the past several weeks, it seemed Seaton had found a moment to reset her magical core, as she seemed balanced. For her, at least.
This relieved me. While I technically knew how to reset her core now, I didn’t have the magical strength to do it. I might well injure both of us even in the attempt. Bless Seaton for keeping her health a priority.
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